Category Archives: Estate Sale Finds

With less than 24 hours to go until Thanksgiving day, I want to wish every one of my readers a heartfelt “Happy Thanksgiving!” I truly have a lot to be thankful for and I intend to spend this time surrounded by the family that God has blessed me with.

I feel it is rather befitting to write this post just before Thanksgiving day because I’m actually really thankful for Amazon FBA this year — and rightly so since I am also thankful that I can end this estate sale update series on a positive note. That’s right… I am officially “in the black” thanks to the last 30 days worth of sales. 🙂

If you remember my last update, I encountered a problem with hundreds of books that I sent in not being available for sale. Once I fixed the problem with my stranded inventory, my book sales resumed to the level where I felt they should be.

It has now been 3 months since the books that I purchased from one of the best estate sale book hauls I’ve attended so far this year have been checked in and have begun selling. As I mentioned in the first and second update, I will continue to share the results of this haul until I become profitable…and that time has finally come.

Sales Outlook

It has been two months since the books that I purchased from one of the best estate sale book hauls I’ve attended so far this year have been checked in and have begun selling. As I mentioned in the first update, I will continue to share the results of this haul until I become profitable. You can read the first update here.

Unfortunately, I didn’t sell as many books in October as I did the previous month. I came close in terms of number of books sold, but I did not meet or exceed last month’s numbers. My gross sales were also down.

Something didn’t seem right about these numbers given the amount of books I sent in and it turns out that something had indeed gone awry. 🙁

On October 28, Amazon sent me an email that I had some items in my “stranded inventory.” I will be honest and say that I’ve never really clicked on the “Stranded Inventory” link within Seller Central — or if I ever did, I never had any stranded inventory so I completely ignored it. Lo and behold, when I went to check things out I had close to 400 stranded items and over 90% of those items were books. Over 200 of those books were from this estate sale. I had absolutely no idea that I had so many books (and other items) sitting in Amazon’s warehouse without an active listing. I’m not sure how this happened and Amazon’s explanation wasn’t very clear.

It has been one month since the check-in process began for a portion of the books that I purchased from one of the best estate sale book hauls I’ve attended so far this year. You can read more about that sale here. I shipped a total of 497 books to Amazon’s warehouses on 8/18. Out of those 497 books, a little over 80 of them were books that I purchased from thrift stores and the rest were books purchased from this particular estate sale.

My shipment arrived at Amazon’s warehouses on 8/25 and the check-in/receiving process officially began that same day. As soon as the check-in process began, books starting flying off the “shelves” so to speak. The bulk of my sales actually occurred over a 4-day period, with sales slowing to a crawl by Friday (8/29) and picking up again on Sunday (8/31). Once that influx of sales was over, the weeks that followed began to paint a better picture of the ebb and flow of selling books on Amazon.

Before I get into specifics, I should note that the sales I discuss below do not paint the most accurate picture because I wasn’t able to ship all of he books that I purchased. I still have over 150 books from this estate sale haul that arrived at Amazon’s warehouse on 9/25 — exactly one month after the first batch was checked in. Yes, I realize that I waited quite a while to ship those remaining books, but in order to get that first shipment of books out the door and into Amazon’s warehouses as quickly as possible, I knew I had to process this haul into two separate shipments. With the first shipment, my main goal was to send in the most profitable books first (those that I purchased during the first half of the sale) and then try to get through as many of the books from the “box lot” hour as possible. As of today (9/26), all of the books purchased from this estate sale are finally out of my house! 🙂

Things have been pretty quiet around my blog lately…and for good reason. Earlier this week I attended one of the best book sales I have ever attended since I started dabbling in selling books on Amazon. I mentioned in my last post that I planned to attend two major sales this month and this happened to be one of them.

I am slowly making my way through my purchase, but I wanted to set aside some time to share my experience with the sale and some of the awesome books that I purchased. Hopefully after reading this, many of my regular readers will understand that I may be on hiatus from this blog for a while as I sort through hundreds of books and prepare them for shipment to Amazon.

Not Your Typical Book Sale…

I tend to shy away from Friends of the Library sales. In fact, I have only attended two of them since I started dabbling in selling books. I generally stick to my usual sources for books which includes thrift stores, estate sales, overstock stores and liquidation stores. Occasionally I will follow up on an interesting Craigslist ad, but those instances are very rare.

This particular “book sale” was actually apart of an estate sale. I had known about it for at least a week and after glancing at photos of the sale, I knew that I had to attend. Thousands of books were up for grabs and these were not your typical run of the mill books (as you will see later).

Several weeks ago I attended an estate sale in search of profitable books to sell on Amazon. I had never attended an estate sale for the sole intent of purchasing books, but this instance has since since changed the way I look at books at estate sales. Come take a journey with me back in time. There’s even a nice little #BOLO somewhere below. 🙂

Estate Sale #1: Scan and You Shall Miss…

This was the first estate sale that got me hooked on books. I had a pretty overwhelming month (in June), but I made time to go to at least one estate sale. I chose this one for two reasons: 1.) It was advertised as being “MASSIVE” with hundreds of new in package items that the owner never opened — and bought multiple sets of, and 2.) because the photos showcased massive floor to ceiling book cases filled with books — books that were owned by a doctor.

There were a LOT of books. In fact, there were so many books that I actually hired a babysitter for a few hours that day so that I could attend the estate sale without my daughter. I knew that I was going to do some serious damage shopping and therefore, I could not have her strapped to me and lift loads of books at the same time.

…did I mention that I also had to drive 66 miles to get to the sale? …yeah, it was THAT serious.

Welcome to my blog! I'm a stay at home mom that got sick and tired of her student loans and decided to do something about it to get rid of them as fast as possible.

I resell for profit. Yes, I'm one of "those" people -- and I intend to use the funds from my part-time pursuits to pay off Sallie Mae -- hopefully before the end of 2016.

I enjoy the thrill of the hunt, whether it is via thrifting, garage sales, retail arbitrage, or even an estate sale.
...stick around, you just may learn a thing or two.